Professor Narins talk at USC U.S.-China Institute about Belt and Road Initiative

Truck driving up a road with mountains in distance

Geography and Planning Professor Tom Narins gave a talk on April 23, 2020 (via Zoom) at the USC U.S.-China Institute on how the Belt and Road Initiative illustrates ways that sovereignty works that conventional international relations fail to account for.

Historical and conventional international relations frameworks describe the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as representing a newly ambitious Chinese drive into global politics, a break from China’s longstanding reticence towards foreign entanglements. As a result, there seems to be a contradiction between China simultaneously defending its own territorial sovereignty while also being engaged in various projects (including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank) that point in other directions.